T. S. Eliot

In 1948, T. S. Eliot accepted IAS Director Frank Aydelotte’s invitation to come to the Institute for Advanced Study for a period of two or three months. A month into his stay, Eliot was working on The Cocktail Party, his modern take on Euripedes’s Alcestis, when news came that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In November 1946, Frank Aydelotte (Director, 1939–47) invited the poet T. S. Eliot to come to the Institute for Advanced Study as a Member in the School of Historical Studies and the first unofficial artist in residence at the Institute. By the time...